Different things work for different people, and there is nothing unnatural about it. Personally, long domains names have never worked for me, dashes or no dashes. I had the "good" fortune of selling several of my "keyword-rich" domain names, many containing dashes, on the DP forum for peanuts, coz even though they were keyword rich, they were flops for me! So I try to keep my domain names short and memorable.

You would notice that Google is famous for being "Google" and not for any keyword. Tremendous value, great service, and continuous technical innovation are primarily what made it the leaders of Yahoo and MSN (even though Big G is probably the youngest of the three SEs).

Let me give you another, humbler example, my own ezine. The domain "nuttiezine" hardly means anything to anyone except me and its subscribers. In fact I would say the domain name is completely meaningless if you go by "keywords". So I would guess that its 200+ subscribers, including you, were all attracted by the content I giveaway for free rather than the domain name, am I right?

Now I am not saying keyword is not important. In fact I would suggest you try to get the best of both worlds: a short, keyword rich domain name! Even if you use dashes, try to keep the domain name as short as possible. It is not easy to find, but if you brainstorm enough, you may get a few! In fact, in one of my earlier issues, I discussed about a free tool that generates good keyword rich domain names for you! Another good thing about short domain names is that if you decide to sell your sites in future. your domain name would count a lot on how much you could charge for your site and how fast it would sell out!

For example, say you are working in the health niche. How about a domain called: healthtips.com? I am sure you would agree it is keyword-rich! Now this niche has several sub-niches under it. For each sub-niche, you build a sub-domain, such as:

fitness.healthtips.com
infections.healthtips.com

and so on!

So that is just my view. If dashes have worked for you, great! At the same time, if you have spare time, you may build one little website based on what I or Matt Cutts say! Don't spend too much time or money on this site. Treat it as a "test" site, so that even if you fail, you would lose little and gain a load of experience. On the other hand, if you manage to make more money than you have so far, then I look forward to your success story!

Good luck in all your ventures!

I am a subscriber to Angela's backlinks and I read your Tiny Guide pdf that was included in this month's pack.

It contained some great advice which is why I subscribed here.

You do offer some fantastic info above, and I look forward to the next installment.

Whenever I create a new website, I first plan the structure and make sure that I name the html pages according to relevant keywords separated by dashes. I try to keep to just one or two words in each page title otherwise it's suddenly not so visitor friendly.

I've had one or two websites that I've written for local businesses on the first page of Google (admittedly they've not been targetting a huge niche) and domain and keywords really do make a difference to the SERPS in my mind.

I hadn't thought about sub-domains though - I guess if you treat each one as a separate domain for SEO and backlinking purposes, that could work really well for splitting bigger niches down.

Many thanks!
Emma

* p.s. I spell the British English way - it's not that I can't spell!

Thanks for your kind of advice. I didn't wonder that the difference of dash and underscore in domain name would serve as different meaning.

Thanks for your kind words

Note: Edited your email address to protect it from spambots

Yes

>>Also the fact that the site is relevant and recently cached.

As for theme, there are two things to note. For one, you would be hard pressed to find HIGH PR, authority sites thematically related to your site. I mean, say you want to build 200 backlinks, and if u r lucky then you may get 100 high PR, relevant sites. For another, you can rank equally well with backlinks from unrelated sites as well. The flip side of using backlinks from unrelated sites is that u would get little direct traffic from the sites themselves. But probably that won't matter to you because your aim is to rank well in Google and get traffic from there, which you WILL get!

No idea about the "cache" thing.

I think it's not possible to register a domain name with underscore (_) in it. Hyphens (-)are allowed. Keyword stuffed hyphenated domains were ranking well on MSN and Yahoo earlier. But slowly they are trying to copy Google's SERp algorithm.

I'm not a big fan of sub domains. 2 years back I built a sub domain site on one of my well established site. But Google refused to rank it....so I dropped sub-domain site ideas. Maybe I should try it again

PS: In my opinion EZA is a useless crap filled with 1000's of pages of dumb worthless content! It makes money for the owner curtsy of Google...